As technology for test and measurement instruments advances, longer record lengths have become available for storing data representing an acquired digitized signal. Because of such long record lengths, it is impractical for a user to manually examine the data representing the acquired digitized signal for interesting events. A user may zoom in on the data in one area of the long record length data using a zoom window to see interesting events in sufficient detail, but due to the long record length it takes the user an unacceptable amount of time to pan the zoom window across the long record length data in order to search for the interesting events. The user may zoom out the zoom window so that panning across the long record length data may be performed in an acceptable amount of time, but the level of detail is so reduced that the user may not see the interesting events. Also positions of the zoom window used for panning may be manually entered, but the user is required to manually record the position of the interesting event and then manually enter the position to return to the interesting event.
To make it easier for the user to examine long record length data, a method of creating marks to identify interesting events in the acquired digitized signal is described in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/498,406, incorporated herein by reference and assigned to the assignee of the present invention, which was filed Aug. 2, 2006, entitled “User-Placed Marks in a Long Record Length Waveform”. The user specifies an interesting event to be searched for in the long record length data representing the acquired digitized signal, and a mark is associated with the long record length data at each location where the interesting event is found. The mark may appear on the display within a zoom window together with the displayed portion of the data from the long record length data surrounding the associated interesting event. The user may now navigate from one mark to the next to examine each interesting event without having to pan through the entire long record length data. However, although the mark has duration due to the definition of the feature used to identify the mark, the described implementation does not deal with visualization of the duration for the mark or allow the duration to be used for further analysis. In order to make a measurement the user has to manually position cursors to identify the points within the long record length data between which the measurement is to be made.
Therefore what is desired is a method of making use of the mark duration for assisting with further analysis of the long record length data.